The Other Bartlet Daughter
by etraytin
Summary: No matter how much she tried, she was not like her sisters. She never really fit in.


Liz Bartlet was not like her sisters. Ever since the first presidential campaign she'd understood that in the minds of most people she was the "other" Bartlet daughter, the one who was older and had a family of her own, the one whose own too-old daughter didn't fit very comfortably into those incredibly-necessary Happy Candidate Family pictures. It wasn't any kind of a revelation though, Liz had always been different. She had never quite fit in.

Liz had been the angry one, the one who loved politics like a Bartlet but wanted no part of it for her own children, right up until she realized that it would save her marriage and family. She'd been proud of her father's skill and ambition, but she'd hated the spotlight it put on her and her kids. Eventually she'd realized that spotlight would not go away, so she'd determined to stand in it and never, ever flinch. Angry Liz had stalked the campaign trails like she had something to prove, dodged all the questions about her marriage and how old she'd been when Annie was born, and shamelessly, ruthlessly pulled every string that came within reach to put her own husband into Congress. She was not like her smiling sisters with their unsoiled hands.

It's not common for oldest children to be the rebels, especially girls, but Liz's rebellions started as soon as she was old enough to think she was in love. Her father wanted to vet any boy she went out with, which she saw as a flagrant abuse of power, so she simply didn't tell her parents about anyone she dated. When she met Doug, she didn't care that he was in college already or that he liked to party; all of that just made him exciting. He was nothing like the boys she'd known her whole life and she liked it. When she'd gotten pregnant, introduced him to her parents, married him and graduated high school, all in the wrong order, her mother had wept.

Liz had definitely never been the smart one. Her parents had wanted to talk to her about options, quiet options, options that would make it easier for her to go to college and have the life they wanted for her. Despite her father's party affiliation and the era, they'd never even whispered abortion, but Liz could've gone away for awhile, "studying abroad." There could've been a quiet adoption, or even a fourth child to the nuclear Bartlet family. It would've meant a few massive lies, but there was little Abbey Bartlet wouldn't do for her family, and if she had gotten pregnant at forty-four, she certainly would've spent plenty of time resting and in seclusion anyway. Liz hadn't wanted to hear any of it. She was brave and in love and so incredibly dumb that looking back she could hardly believe she was the same person. Dumb, dumb Liz had walked down the aisle a week after her eighteenth birthday, a tiny church wedding with a quarter of the pews full and a huge bouquet in her hands to disguise her stomach, more eager to start her new independent life than worried about the man she was going to start it with. Ellie and Zoey, too young to even be proper bridesmaids, had watched it all uncomprehendingly. Liz had never really fit in with her sisters.

…..

Ellie Bartlet was not like her sisters. She'd first understood the difference during her father's gubernatorial campaign, when Liz had made polished speeches for the newspaper reporters and Zoey had charmed the local television personalities with her tap-dancing and tumbling skills. Ellie was the other Bartlet daughter, the one who was never around during campaign appearances and who blended into walls and scenery when she was dragged along.

Ellie had been the angry one, the only daughter who had resisted her father's rise into higher office. She barely remembered his time in the state house, but she'd been hardly more than a baby when he'd gone off to Congress and they were suddenly splitting time between New Hampshire and Washington DC. That had been bad enough for Ellie, who grew up watching Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers and all the family television programs, her heart desperate for a normal house on a normal street where maybe she still wouldn't make friends, but she wouldn't be so incredibly isolated all the time. She'd been sure that when her father left Congress he would be a teacher again, and she would finally have the life she wanted. When he informed the family that he was running for governor, she'd locked herself in her room and not spoken to him for four days. He barely noticed. By the time he made his run for the Presidency, Ellie was too old for a normal life and had given up on dreaming about things that were never going to happen.

Ellie was the family rebel, in her own small and often fruitless ways. She abandoned the campaign trail without a second thought, staying with her Barrington grandparents during the governor's races, hiding in school for the Presidential runs. Zoey was the perfect political daughter, bright and vivacious, helping the volunteers, making herself photogenic in a hundred different ways. Even Liz, with her own life and her own family had turned out to help with the campaigns, lending her political acumen and flawless public speaking ability to her father's cause. Those two appeared in the media all the time, and were popular surrogates in their own right as soon as Zoey was old enough to fly with only her Secret Service detail. Ellie appeared in the minimum required number of campaign photographs, just so that people wouldn't think Jed Bartlet had invented a second daughter for nefarious reasons, and otherwise isolated herself from that entire world. When her father had taken the White House, she'd refused to let them decorate a room to be hers. It wasn't for her.

And in a family of incessant talkers, arguers, persuaders, Ellie was always the dumb one. She didn't thrive on confrontations and Socratic conversations like her sisters, she just froze up and tried to melt through the floor until the interrogator lost interest. When their father scolded them, Liz would yell and Zoey would pout, but Ellie would duck her head and disappear behind her dishwater hair until the lecture was over. Eventually most of his lectures were about how she wouldn't look him in the eye or stand up for what she believed in, two abiding core values of the Bartlet household. She could never make him understand that she wasn't like her sisters.

…...

Zoey Bartlet was not like her older sisters. Ever since childhood she'd understood herself to be lacking some fundamental quality of drive that both Liz and Ellie had in spades. They were real Bartlet daughters, they knew exactly what they wanted and what they were going to do to get it, even if their desires and methods were vastly different. Liz wanted her family and she wanted respect, and she worked for those things with a singleminded intensity that was sometimes intimidating to her much-younger sister. Ellie wanted medicine and a life free of politics, and she'd worked at it like a prisoner digging a tunnel out of a cell, patiently and quietly every day for years until she finally broke free. Zoey was the other Bartlet daughter, the baby, the unformed, unmotivated little girl.

For all she usually tried to hide it, Zoey was definitely the angry one in her family. Liz and Ellie had gotten a chance to be normal kids, or mostly normal kids, at least. By the time Zoey had been born, her father had already been planning his first Congressional run, and nothing was ever normal after that. Zoey grew up the Congressman's daughter, the Governor's daughter, the Candidate's daughter, and finally the President's sixteen-year-old daughter, getting her license while living in the White House, having her school friends vetted by the Secret Service. There had never been a single moment in Zoey's entire life when she'd been Zoey the dancer or Zoey the actress or Zoey the poet. She was Zoey who belonged to Jed Bartlet and everything she did was a reflection on somebody else. Was it any wonder she had no idea who she was?

Zoey tried her hand at rebellion in the White House, with some part of her figuring it was at least one way to stand out in her family. She dated one of her father's employees, four years her senior, and dodged her Secret Service detail. She found a beautiful, aristocratic boyfriend she barely even liked and flaunted him to her family, planned an impetuous and quite probably unwise trip to France with him. Her first boyfriend got her father shot, her second got her kidnapped and almost killed, and very nearly changed the state of American politics. After all her rebellions ended in international incidents, she decided that maybe she wasn't cut out for rebellion after all, but it didn't make her fit in any better.

It was a mortal lock that Zoey was the dumb one in the family. Liz was a brilliant speaker and Ellie was just plain brilliant, but Zoey didn't even know what she wanted to be when she grew up. Her grades were fine but not brilliant, her political acumen nonexistent even after a literal lifetime in the business. Blood made her feel faint and dizzy. She studied English Literature at school because she couldn't pick a major and didn't want to follow either of her parents into their highly demanding fields. She thought about writing someday, knew that it wouldn't be hard for her to get a book deal for her memoirs of the Bartlet White House, but that wasn't what she wanted. She wanted to write something for Zoey Bartlet, the writer, not for Zoey Bartlet, the leftover Bartlet daughter. If she could do that, then maybe someday she'd have a hope of measuring up to her sisters.


End file.
